There is an old quote that I have very easily warmed up to, and it goes that smaller minds discuss people, things, and events while the better minds discuss ideas. I don’t know who originally said this, but I feel that is strongly correlates to a number of issues I’ve got with certain forms of entertainment. I may sound like hypocrite because I myself am discussing a certain type of people, but the idea behind it bears word that needs to be spoken now more than ever.

You read the title of this rant so I am going to cut to the chase. Can people please just shut the ever-loving hell up about “bad” fandoms?! Jesus, this is the most irritating conversation that I hear people have daily every moment they wake up! Why does the fact that some people are rowdier than others prevent other people from unironically enjoying what they are trying to enjoy whether it be a cartoon, book, game, or what-have-you? Why do people have to put how supposedly well-behaved the other guy is first before the quality of the work, and what does one have to do with the other? It’s starting to sound like an intellectual fetish of some sort!

I remember back in my days when I used to be on DeviantArt, and the sooner I forget about those days in that hate-group the better, where you could not go one step without getting into firestorm after firestorm about fandom. Stamps about which fandom was supposedly the worst polluted every corner of that place and it still does. Every time I logged in, there was new hate-stamp suggesting that “fandom abuse kills interest.”

Question, why the hell do you care? You would have to be an ex-DeviantArtist yourself to understand what I’m trying to convey. The fact that these people are so anal to see other people behave in a certain manner already just screams Nazi. What is even worse is that fan-haters project their prejudice onto the insert work here itself as if one is somehow responsible for the other.

I digress, though, because it’s thanks to the fandom-gestapo that I am absolutely petrified to write original fiction. I’m scared that I am going to get a following, someone is gonna come up and demand to have their “opinion respected,” my fans will refuse, and thus I will be branded as overrated for life. No, seriously, the fandom-gestapo is actually suppressing voices from the little guy. They won’t accept anything that is grounded in reality from other people like sexual and gender nonconformists, women, Africans, Middle-Easterners, as well as neurodivergents like me.

This argument got old the moment it started.

This is out of response to AO3’s “This Week in Fandom” segment as of August 28th that apparently featured a “Worst Dedicated Fandom” competition.

One Comment

You don’t work for the angry mob. You write for you, so do it and insert them into your fiction just to spite them, if you’re so inclined. I love the smell of burning bridges, personally. It smells like…. victory.